College Art Exhibit Displays a Genuine Interest in Fakes : Forgeries: Viewers get to see more than two dozen clever copies and are challenged to pick out the originals. The show runs through Dec. 2.

Pretend you are a wealthy art collector. Before you are two medieval manuscripts, both painted on vellum, both showing centuries of wear. Unfortunately, one is a fake.

How will you discern which manuscript dates back to medieval times and which was painted by a notorious Spanish forger in the 19th Century?

You might start by honing your connoisseurship at Pomona College’s Montgomery Gallery, where “Artful Deception: The Craft of the Forger” is on display through Dec. 2. The exhibit, which is traveling across the country, was organized by curators at the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore.

At this unusual show, viewers get a glimpse of more than two dozen fakes--from 16th-Century Russian icons to the “Mona Lisa” to ancient busts of Roman youths. In some cases, the fakes are paired with genuine works in the same style. Viewers are invited to study them, read about the actual artist’s style and background, then choose which piece they think is authentic. Sliding open a panel reveals whether the viewer has a future in art scholarship.

As compelling as the “whodunit” tests are the cloak-and-dagger tales that accompany the forgeries, many of which have been exhibited as genuine for years.

For instance, the “Spanish forger” who faked the medieval manuscripts was a highly skilled and clever painter who went to great lengths to disguise his forgeries by using vellum that dated back to the Middle Ages, painting in the style of medieval illuminators and then “aging” his works.

The forger, who art historians think was actually a Frenchman working in Paris during the Victorian era, went undetected in his own time. But 20th-Century art historians notice--as Montgomery patrons may also--that the forger was undone by his faces. To the contemporary eye, they smack of the cloying sweetness of the Victorian era and do not reflect the more somber, pious style of painters who worked in the Middle Ages.

Copying important works of art is a practice that dates back to ancient Egypt, says Montgomery Gallery Director Marjorie L. Harth, who points out that not all fakes and forgeries were initially meant to deceive.

The Romans, for instance, loved the classical Greek style and commissioned numerous copies of Greek art that were considered legitimate and highly desirable.

Other artists were illicitly copied during their own lifetimes. Painter and wood engraver Albrecht Durer went to court in the early 16th Century to halt reproductions. On the other hand, Rubens and Rembrandt encouraged their students and assistants to copy their work as a way to learn the master’s style.

And Jean Baptiste Camille Corot (1796-1875) occasionally signed his students’ works to help them professionally in their careers, thus muddying the waters for generations of art historians to come. As a result, says Harth, practically all Corots--especially landscapes such as the one represented in the Pomona show--have come under suspicion.

The public’s fascination with art and forgeries may be heightened by the millions of dollars that masterpieces command today on world markets, Harth says. A Van Gogh self-portrait in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art was recently removed from display when its authenticity was questioned. Ditto the “Kouros,” a classical Greek bust of a youth displayed by the J. Paul Getty Museum, which came under suspicion when a very similar sculpture known to be a fake appeared on the market.

The Pomona show explains the high-tech tools today’s art historian uses to detect fakes: X-rays, infrared photographs and pigment analysis. One work in the show, a supposed early 16th-Century “Venetian Renaissance” panel painting of St. George slaying the dragon, was revealed as a 19th-Century fake after the Walters Conservation Lab noticed some suspiciously heavy overpainting on the canvas.

An X-ray revealed a late 16th-Century painting of the Last Supper underneath. Subsequent analysis showed that the scene of St. George and the dragon was painted over the earlier work in the 19th Century. The curators have removed several sections of the forgery to reveal the head of one of Christ’s disciples and the small dog at Christ’s feet, giving patrons a fascinating glimpse at a forgery exposed.

In addition to technical tools, historians use their knowledge to match artistic styles and flourishes with the appropriate cultures and epochs.

Harth calls it “the complicated, interrelated workings of eye and brain.” Perception, he says, is determined by context, “by the conditions, physical and intellectual, under which we see the work.”

“Once you know which one is authentic, it will look better than it did, and the one labeled fake will look worse,” Harth promises.

Fakes provide fascinating reference points for art historians. Like a slightly warped mirror, they reflect a skewed view of artistic reality--but as with any illusion, they draw the viewer in.

“Fakes speak eloquently of fallibility and of gullibility,” Harth says. “Fakes . . . teach us to understand and to value authenticity in art.”

Forgers often are unable to transcend the barriers of their own time. A bust of a king from ancient Egypt’s Ptolemaic dynasty is revealed as a fake by the playful, naive and human expression on the face. Walters curators say this is greatly at odds with the work of ancient Egyptian stone carvers, who depicted their kings as men of strength and power--austere, remote and on a plane above mere mortals.

Other times, fakes give themselves away by sloppy inattention to detail. A “Gothic” ivory carving in the exhibit was revealed as a fake when scholars noticed that St. Catherine is seated in the center, with the apostles Peter and Paul to the sides. A true Gothic carver, pious and theologically schooled, would never have ranked a mere saint above the apostles.

Cross-cultural faking is even more difficult than that which attempts to transcend epochs. A pink ceramic vessel, allegedly from 18th-Century China’s Ching Dynasty, is revealed as a 19th-Century Western European imitation by its lack of subtlety and its inability to reproduce the two-dimensional composition of Asian art popular at that time.

Often, however, forgers are artists in their own right and earn the grudging admiration of art historians for their clever, albeit misplaced, genius.

Icilio Federico Joni (1866-1946) was a Sienese painter, restorer, art dealer and forger who specialized in Renaissance paintings. Joni, who often used panels that dated from the Renaissance to throw historians off the scent, was unmasked because he allowed too many paintings to trace their provenance, or ownership history, back to him. In addition, Joni gave all the characters in his paintings the same long, broad noses and elaborate halos.

Then there was Reinhold Vasters (1827-1909), the nearly perfect forger. A master goldsmith from Aachen, Germany, Vasters forged jewelry and decorative works in Renaissance style but was never exposed during his lifetime. The forgeries came to light in the early 1980s, when the working drawings for his fakes were discovered in the storerooms of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Perhaps, say the Walters curators, he left documentation to salve his ego and assure himself that his talent--and his ability to fool the experts of his time--would one day be known to all.

Forgeries aren’t always aesthetically inferior, either. Of the two Sevres clocks on display at the gallery, Harth says several curators would argue that the fake is actually superior.

So what, then, is wrong with fakes?

The Walters curators say: “A discredited work of art can only distort and obscure our view of the past.”

Harth adds that a forgery blemishes the reputation of the real artist and, perhaps more dangerously, creates a false basis of information about the artist and the period in question with which to judge future works.

What makes Dutch painter Jan Vermeer (1632-1675) great, Harth says, “is not only that he painted beautiful pictures but that he painted certain pictures in a certain way at a certain time in the history and development of art. In addition to the craftsmanship, technique and cleverness of the painting, it shows genuine creative achievement.”

AN ORIGINAL EXHIBIT

“Artful Deception: The Craft of the Forger” will be at the Montgomery Gallery at Pomona College in Claremont until Dec. 2. Gallery hours are 1 to 5 p.m. daily, including weekends. Admission is free.

Pomona College is at the corner of College and Bonita avenues in Claremont.

The exhibition is sponsored by the Pomona-Scripps Galleries Program and was organized by the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore and circulated by the Trust for Museum Exhibitions in Washington.

On Saturday, a symposium will be held from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Lyman Hall in Pomona College’s Thatcher Music Building, titled “Whodunit?: Issues of Authenticity in Art.”

The event will include a panel discussion and talks by experts including Jerry Podany, conservator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum; Marion True, curator of antiquities at the Getty; Stephen Erickson, professor of philosophy at Pomona College, and Clifton C. Olds, professor of the history of art and criticism at Bowdoin College in Maine.